Friday Sessions are informal talks and presentations hosted by
public works on Friday evenings with invited guests and
friends.

Join us for Wick Session No.22 on Thursday the 6th of November
2014 at 7PM:

CHARTER OF THE FORESTRE-WILDINGFOR THE LOVE OF TREES

A celebration of the anniversary of The Charter of
the Forest, which was first issued on 6 November 1217 as a
complementary charter to the Magna Carta. This gave commoning
rights to common people in England's forest, heaths and chases. The
evening will start with a talk by Ben Cowell, Regional Director,
National Trust &
trustee of Our Democratic Heritage, on The Charter of the Forests,
the Magna Carta, and the New Commons, followed by: Rewilding, a
performance workshop by The FLOCK / Grow Art
Collective and end with For the love of trees: a short dramatic
monologue by Natasha
Langridge. The session is organised by Occupy London, hosted by R-Urban Wick as part of The New Putney Debates.

Attendance is free but signing up for a ticket
here will give the organisers an idea of audience numbers

Ben Cowell on The Charter of the Forest: Then and
Now
Henry III's Charter of the Forest was issued on 6 November 1217, as
an adjunct to the reissued Great Charter of Liberties. Indeed, it
was in order to differentiate the Charter of the Forest from the
Charter of Liberties that the latter gained the name 'Magna Carta',
being the longer of the two documents. Several of the liberties
reaffirmed in the Charter of the Forest dated from the first
version of Magna Carta, sealed by Henry's father King John in June
1215. The Charter of the Forest, however, dealt exclusively with
the rights and liberties that the king's subjects held over land,
in particular the open forests, heaths, commons and wastes that had
multiple uses in the medieval economy.The Charter of the Forest
therefore disclosed a customary relationship with the natural
world, which by and large was extinguished in the centuries that
followed as a consequence of enclosure, urbanisation and
industrialisation. What lessons might we learn today from the
Charter of the Forest, and the reassertion of a more communal and
collaborative approach to the custodianship of our precious natural
resources?Ben Cowell is Regional Director for the National Trust in
the East of England, and a trustee of Our Democratic Heritage and
The Heritage Alliance.

Rewilding – a performance workshop by The FLOCK/ Grow
Art collective.
Re-wilding – a workshop/performance on the dynamic between the
space of a city and the space of nature. Through a combination of
intuitive and guided movements, this workshop will explore the
inherent dynamics of the two spaces and how they are felt through
the individual body as well as the body of the group. The
exploration is done at a primal and intuitive level and all
participants are welcome, there is no requirement of previous
movement/theatre experience. - Grow Art Collective

Natasha Langridge will give a reading from an extract of
her monologue – For the Love of Trees:
If I look outside my window to the left cranes and drills are in my
face. I could touch the builders if I stretched out far enough. I
don't. I look to my right. And down. Into the little park. A Cherry
tree is just beneath me. And beneath that a bench. Where city
lovers steal a kiss in the chaos of London mornings, where Moroccan
elders meet their sons to light up a Tagine for lunch, where a
Granny hands out the best supermarket deals of the day as birds
sing of other day to day stuff. I am still writing about my lost
lover. Until one day at half past three. The bulldozers thunder
into the green. Men in orange jackets section the park into three.
The Mayor of London logo blazes. In the space of one hour eight
trees are chopped to stumps. Diggers turn the grass to rubble. A
black bird sings wildly. A crane moves stealthily towards the
cherry tree... - One woman's personal experience of
regeneration.